‘Total shock’: Families lose decades of legacy at Priest Lake as state auctions off their leased land

Doug Cossette’s parents first took him to Priest Lake three months after he was born in 1951. It’s been in his blood ever since.

Frequent visits to the deep, clear-water lake known for sandy shores that are ringed by majestic Selkirk Mountain peaks became something more meaningful in 1967.

That’s when Cossette’s father purchased, for about $100, a lease from a Tonasket family for a lot, owned by the state of Idaho, on the east side of Priest Lake that formed a point near Eight Mile Island.

That next spring, when Cossette and his two brothers took too long to dismantle the old cabin there, their father put a match to the problem and burned it down in 20 minutes.

“Then we started digging,” Doug Cossette said. “I was 17. We moved in 19 days after we started it.”

That 918-square-foot lakeside cabin hosted birthdays, holidays, family reunions, teenage sleepovers, fishing trips, snowmobile outings and lazy afternoons as the sun provided the east side of lake precious extra minutes of sunlight in the summer before dipping below the timberline.

Those sunsets then brought long sleeves, campfires, s’mores and meals. Neighbors knew all their neighbors. They helped each other build cabins and plow roads in the winter.

They were and remain “lake” people.

“We put it through the generations,” Cossette said of the family cabin. “I was raised there. I raised my kids there. I raised my grandkids there. We all just loved being there together, summers and winters.

“It is the cement that keeps the family together.”

On Aug. 23, Cossette, 74, watched his family legacy crumble.

Last year, knowing he was not going to renew the lease that was set to increase to $76,800 a year, he sold the the cabin his father built 57 years ago to neighboring cabin owner David Rubens, a retired Spokane attorney.

That weekend the IDL auctioned off the Cossette cabin lot. Rubens won the auction which included about $1.9 million for the land and about $300,000 for the cabin, according to county and auction records.

“I couldn’t fiscally do that,” Cossette, a retired Spokane Valley business owner, said of the high lease payment that would have kept his family on the lake. “I could take three or four trips around the world for that kind of money. That’s a ridiculous amount of money for a lease.”

Rubens declined an interview request.

On Friday, crews began tearing the Cossette cabin down.

“Total shock,” Cossette said after learning from a different neighbor about the demolition. “It proves the point that people don’t care about other people’s feelings or history or anything.”

At the auction earlier this month, Cossette watched other properties sold that had been leased by his friends.

“All they want is money,” Cossette said of the Idaho Department of Lands. “They don’t care about feelings or more than a million dollars paid in leases. They say it’s for the endowment and for the kids.

“But Idaho is the second-worst state for what they give for education. I’m not a big fan of the state of Idaho.”

Actually, Cossette was wrong. Idaho ranks dead last among states for K-12 spending per pupil, according to 2025 report by the Education Data Initiative.

Boosting state coffers

Cossette said he was told by old-timers that state officials, knowing they had summers free, specifically invited teachers to lease many of the 354 lots it owned on the east side of the lake going back generations. Those leases pumped money into state projects.

“My father-in-law was a teacher. My mother-in-law was a teacher,” Cossette said. “Their next-door neighbor was a teacher. The guy next to them, three cabins away, was a teacher.”

Being farther north than Lake Coeur d’Alene and Hayden Lake, which have become dominated by mansions and rich owners, Priest Lake by default provided one of the last opportunities where North Idaho and Spokane-area working couples could afford a lake place.

That arrangement flourished for decades. But higher land values and changing state priorities set those cabin owners and Idaho officials on a collision course.

That “split estate” arrangement finally changed in 2010 when the Idaho Land Board, which is chaired by the governor and consists of the state’s top elected officials, voted to do away with the leases, meaning the state would have to buy out the cabin owners or they would have to purchase the lots.

The situation got complicated further in 2012, when the Idaho Supreme Court overturned a law that protected leaseholders from having bidders swoop in with more money to take over the lots in competitive auctions.

As a result of that ruling, any lot that came up for lease or sale would go to the highest bidder without regard for the family who created a legacy there.

Then in 2014, the state began holding the auctions that have sold all but 17 remaining state-owned lots, said Roger Hall, the real estate bureau chief for the Idaho Department of Lands.

“At the moment, we do not have an auction plan for next year,” Hall said.

Most of the remaining cabin owners have signed new five-year lease agreements. So, unless they request it from the state, the next round of auctions would not come until 2029.

Cossette said he was told by state officials that the leases will end in 2029, regardless of what decisions the lease holders make.

“After that, you have to buy the lot or walk away,” he said. “It all ends as of 2029.”

Hall, who acknowledged that the state has fielded multiple complaints about the process, said his agency faces little choice.

“We are beholden to two strong-legal requirements that we focus on money and generating revenue for the endowment,” he said. “One nice thing that does, it makes the state as a whole more affordable. That means the rest of the state is paying less property taxes for schools.”

Just based on the auction on Aug. 23, Idaho generated $7.9 million from the sale of five lots, including the Cossette cabin. Two of the state-owned lots were not leased or sold.

Since the auctions began in 2014, the state has generated more than $208 million for the endowment, which has managed to mostly go toward funding schools, Hall said.

But the sale of the Priest Lake lots, and some at Payette Lake near McCall, also have provided other benefits, he said.

“We’ve been able to purchase 54,000 acres of timberland. A good chunk of that money came from these cottage sites,” Hall said.

He noted that Idaho generates about $100 million of year from the roughly 2.5 million acres it manages for the endowment. Of that, about 90% comes from sale of timber on state-owned lands.

Most of those lands provide recreation access to hikers, hunters, campers and other outdoor recreation, he said.

“We do get some complaints form time to time. When you run a program this big, there is bound to be some people who don’t like exactly how it’s done,” Hall said. “The most common I would say would be when we increase from one lease to the next because the (land) value is going through the roof the last 10 years.”

For comparison, the average leaseholder paid about $11,000 in 2012, according to newspaper archives.

That next year, in 2013, Idaho appraised Cossette’s lot for $417,000, he said. Under the current formula, that put the annual lease cost at about $16,680.

Then in 2020, the state re-appraised the .68-acre lot for about $880,000.

Based on the state’s formula for lease costs (4% of the appraised lot value), that put the annual lease payment for the Cossettes at about $35,200 each year for the five-year lease that just ended.

But the state’s latest appraisal, which takes in to account the highest and best use rather than the typically lower assessments used by the county for property tax purposes, put the value of the lot, not including the cabin, at $1.92 million.

That means the first year of the 2025 lease would have cost Cossette about $76,800.

“We knew we were going to be leaving,” Cossette said. “I couldn’t afford this kind of money.”

Changing demographic

Josh Lubig, 50, of Millwood, grew up on the west side of Priest Lake. His family opened a gas station in 1980. It’s now known as the Priest Lake Services Center.

“I grew up pumping gas. My dad was the mechanic. Everybody bought gas from us,” he said. “You knew everybody who had a cabin, especially on the west side.”

His parents sold the station in 2006, but the Lubig family retained the property behind the business. His family, like the Cossettes, loves everything about the place.

“You travel around the world, work and live in other places, and you understand how special the community is,” Lubig said. “The hard winters and summers on the lake, there’s a hardiness up there for the people who spend the year up there. It’s the lake. It’s my home.”

But the shifting ownership of the cabins around the lake has modified the feel of the community.

“It certainly changed when more eyeballs got to find Priest Lake,” Lubig said. “We always joked that we had one friend who was the millionaire. Now, he’s the poorest guy we know.”

Up until recently, Cossette has taken boat tours around the lake and watched as family cabins have disappeared only to be replaced by mansions that never before had dominated the shoreline.

“Now there are $5 or $6 or $8 million homes everyplace. This is just a second or third home for them,” he said. “The problem I have with that is most of these people are not lake people. We drive around and nobody is on the beach on the weekend or the dock.

“They weren’t there when they were kids. They don’t have the appreciation for the lake like I do.”

In 1971, Cossette worked on the other side of the lake pumping gas, like Lubig, at a private store that is now part of the Indian Creek Campground.

One day, a 16-year-old girl boated up for fuel. Her dad had a cabin a mile-and-a-half away.

“She came down with a girlfriend to fill up her dad’s boat with gas. I heard she was a good skier. I knew her mom and dad, so we started skiing together,” he said. “After 48 years, we are still married. My brother met his wife there in 1985 or ‘86. It’s known as Priest Lake romances.”

The families grew, but the one constant was Priest Lake on the weekends.

Cossette’s father “built this because he wanted a place where he could bring all his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews to have family time together. My dad was all about family. He taught me that,” he said. “It was funner than heck. Priest Lake provided that.”

With the new lease decision looming, the Cossette family gathered in January to collect all the keepsakes from 57 years inside the same cabin, the one that was being torn down Friday.

“The grandkids especially miss it. The two grandsons, all they do all day is fish. The girls, they want to be on the beach,” Cossette said. “I know my daughter misses it a lot. We just enjoyed each others’ company.”

The loss of a source of so many memories, milestones and sunsets is difficult to tolerate.

“I have accepted it. My wife hasn’t,” he said. “She won’t go to Priest Lake because she’s so upset about losing it.”